The purpose of an object administration system is to enable effective and easy management, in a network, of a set of highly diverse information processing resources, by manipulating them like objects. Current knowhow relates to the administration of a network or network resources that involve telecommunications equipment and computers. To aid in the management of a certain number of items of equipment, mechanisms or devices already in existence accordingly make it possible to obtain information by way of the communications systems: examples are bridges, dispatchers, or routers multiplexers, communications layers in computers, and so forth. To authorize such management, a dialog is set up by way of a predetermined standard administrative protocol and through the network, by means of queries, sent by the administration system to the various information processing resources, and responses to these queries, made to the administration system by the information processing resources involved. To make this dialog possible, an information processing device especially intended to facilitate the execution of this task is implanted in each information processing resource. This device is in fact the equivalent of the administration system in the equipment supporting the information processing resource to be administered, and it is this device that will execute the various orders on the account of the distant administration system. These devices are of various types depending on the administrative object model that they support and on the administrative protocol that they employ to communicate with the administration system. One example of such a device is the SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) agent, which is described in the paper entitled "Simple Network Management Protocol", Internet Working Group Request for Comments 1157, May 1990, and which uses the object model and administrative protocol defined by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).
However, except for the devices described above, there are no mechanisms that make it possible to manage applications being run on different computers, and consequently these applications are not currently being administered. Hence this need, which arose virtually with the appearance of systems administration, is felt increasingly keenly, particularly with respect to applications that carry out dialog in the networks (data base, messaging, etc.), as well as applications specific to business (order management, exchanges between locations or branches, etc.). One question then arises: How can information relating to applications that are not necessarily effectively in the resource to be administered be collected? An initial response consists of providing for integration of an agent when an application is developed. In fact, in general, making a resource administratable means that the resource must be known, and accessing means must be created in order to make it controllable through an agent. Thus when an operating system is involved, access is conventionally documented, and when information is not available through a system call, it is generally possible to go and read this information in the memory itself of the system with a symbols table that provides the correspondence between a variable and its address in memory. Conversely, for applications, there is at present no external way whatever for an agent to collect the information, and it must be noted that the current trend is not to offer such access. In any case, another fundamental question arises: How can applications, for which modification is neither desired nor possible, be administered?